'I wouldn't have hurt you,' said Jarvellis. 'I've never hurt anyone.'

'Yes,' said Tull, stepping back with his wife, then closing the elevator door on her.

Jarvellis considered what she had just said. It was true: personally she had never inflicted injury on anyone. What concern was it of hers what people did with the weapons she smuggled? They were the criminals. She was just trying to make a decent profit. That was all right, wasn't it?

Weight returned and pulled her head down onto the worn decking. The elevator door slid open and, as it did so, feeling returned to her body. Jarvellis sat upright and looked down at Sam. The little robot held the nerve-blocker in one three-fingered claw. It held it up above itself as if frightened she was going to hit it and so was demonstrating how it had helped her. She looked to the bundle of clothes and the food. The latter was out of the question at the present. The one-quarter G that dispelled space sickness was pulling at and twisting those places where she had been cell-welded, and where the clamps and probes had been pulled out. She now effectively felt as if someone had methodically pinched over her skin with a pair of pliers. She reached for the clothing: disposable underwear and deck shoes, a soft cloth shirt and padded trousers. With hands that did not seem to have any grip in them she slowly dressed herself. Once this was done she felt better, and began to think what the future might hold for her. Her prospects did not seem much better than they had done outside. Now though, she was beginning to feel hope. Maybe John was not dead yet. Maybe, even if he was, she could get to that bastard Pelter. Maybe she could live.

'Please take the bag and step out of the elevator, Captain,' said Tull over an intercom.

Jarvellis did as she was told, faintly amused that the intercom had crackled like the one in the Lyric, only this intercom crackle was genuine.

'The cabins to your left you will find comfortable. We maintain them for visitors from the surface.'

She headed in that direction, wondering where Tull might have positioned pinhead cameras, then it occurred to her that the EM pulse might have knocked those out as well. Any systems on the outer ring of the station, unprotected by its bulk, would have gone down, and the little cameras were prone to do so. Then again, maybe there were no cameras. She was assuming he might be as paranoid as herself. She stopped at a door and pressed one of the two square buttons beside it. A buzzer sounded inside. She pressed the other button and the door slid open. At the threshold she paused; she might well be walking willingly into her own prison. She shook her head and stepped back. When the door closed again, she squatted down and opened the bag.

It contained fresh fruit, probably from the station's hydroponics, film-wrapped sandwiches with some sort of meat filling, even a small bottle of a wine that bore the name 'Passion' on its label. As Jarvellis looked up from the bag, it occurred to her that she would not remember the Outlinkers' generosity. After ECS tried her for arms smuggling, and then mind-wiped her, she would remember nothing. She'd be a pregnant mother operating on instinct: a mere animal until they downloaded a personality into her, and - whether construct or real -that personality would never be her own. She closed the bag, stood up, and began walking. In the cabin she could just hear Tull's voice speaking over the intercom. No cameras, then. She knew that the Oudinkers would have some sort of AG shuttle at the centre of the station for their own use. What she now wondered was if any of the station's original shuttles remained in this outer ring.

Dawn flung greenhouse light across the land. It seemed, with this coloration to the light, that the temperature should be high. But the day began wintry and showed no sign of changing as it advanced. Viewed from above, the ruins had the appearance of an impact site in the forest of blue oaks and chequer trees, and perhaps at one time that was precisely what this had been. The two bikes skimmed over crumbling buildings towards the central ring of the broken dome. They came in to land at the edge of the dome, where there was just enough room to fit the sky-bikes close together on apparently firm ground.

Donning their helmets, the four advanced through the wreckage, their boots crunching on broken glass and heat-splintered plascrete. All around, old wiring and the remnants of computer systems were sinking into decay.

Most surfaces were covered with grey and yellow lichens. This ruin could have been thousands of years old, rather than the few hundred it actually was. Soon all four stood at the rim of the dark shaft of one of the underground silos.

Cormac gazed into that dark and contemplated what these ruins meant. This is what happened when worlds seceded from the Polity. This is what happened when base humanity tried to govern itself.

'Cormac,' came Mika's voice over his comunit. 'The dracomen just grabbed the AGC. They're coming your way'

'Shit!'

Cormac looked up at the sky, but could see no craft. What was Dragon up to? What were the dracomen up to? He was tempted to put a hold on the mission until he found out, but, after thinking about the chances of getting some answers out of the dracomen, he decided to go on.

'Thorn, put a shot down there and see what stirs.'

Thorn leant over the edge and fired. The purple flash disclosed the depth of the silo before rubble exploded from it on a hot flash. Something began screeching in the ruins behind them and they turned to see a couple of corvine birds flap raggedly into the sky. Thorn tracked their course for a moment, and then turned back to the silo. The rest of them turned with him and, as smoking stones rained down, they waited expectandy.

Eventually Thorn said, in a bored voice, 'Nothing stirring.'

'Try the next one,' Cormac told him.

They circled the edge of the silo, well back from the corroded metal at its lip. Thorn made adjustments on his weapon.

'If this doesn't work, do we move on to the CTDs?' he asked casually.

'Have to,' said Cormac.

He could see Thorn's smile of satisfaction.

Shortly they reached the lip of the next silo.

'Energy readings… difficult to locate,' said Aiden.

Thorn moved forwards. 'We'll see—'

It shot out of the next silo like a white-hot jack-in-the-box. Cormac's visor polarized, re-adjusted - and before him was the fantastic creation of some godlike glass-maker. It was a dragon, a real dragon. Then, the next moment, it was not.

The Maker seemed to be made of glass supported by bones that were glowing tungsten filaments. It had a long swanlike neck ending in a nightmare head that had something of a lizard and something of a praying mantis about it. Wings opened out, seemingly batlike at first, then taking on the appearance of a mass of sails. A heavy claw gripped the edge of the underground silo, or was it a hand shaped like the body of a millipede, with hundreds of leglike fingers? A glowing bullwhip tail thrashed the air, sprouted sails, fins, light. Cormac froze. The Maker was about five metres high. How had it gotten through a twenty-centimetre hole? Then he realized: it was not matter, it was energy; it could probably be any size. He had just never seen anything like it before. Was it Dragon's ultimate joke to name itself thus, when the kind that had made it looked like this?

'Bastard!' came Thorn's voice over the static on com. He fired. The proton beam hit the Maker and diffused from the other side. It jerked back and a bolt of white light shot from its jaws, splashed into Thorn and wrapped around him. For a moment he seemed to be struggling against snakes of light, then, as if the force of it had only just caught up, he was flung back. Cento and Aiden fired too. In return, two bolts of a different colour hit them. They both sat down with an undignified thump. Cormac lowered his weapon as the creature rose over him. Then an AGC streaked past its head, and it turned to watch the car as it circled and came back. The top of the car had been ripped away, and the dracomen were visible. One of them was firing a laser carbine. Pins of red light were flickering in the Maker's body; beyond this there was no visible effect. The car streaked past again and kept going. The Maker made a sound like the gusting sigh of a strong wind, watching them go, then turned its attention back to Cormac.